Companies providing a product or service to end users, for example via a website, often rely on various types of advertising to attract the end users and increase traffic to the website. Conventional advertising strategies often involve either a recurring indiscriminate broadcast to a general population of recipients or a focused broadcast to a target demographic. With such strategies, the effect of the advertisement in reaching the target demographic or generating a desired response, such as increasing traffic to the website, is unknown or uncertain. For example, the demographic of people that watch a certain television show may be known. If the demographic matches a target demographic for a website, an advertisement for the website may be presented during the television show with the hopes that it reaches the target demographic and increases traffic to the website. An actual increase in traffic to the website, however, may be attributable to any number of factors. It is challenging to correlate any change in traffic to an event, such as an advertisement, with reasonable certainty.
Further, a company will often only have data regarding actions taken by end users within the network operated by the company and regarding how the end users were directed to the network. For example, a company operating a content distribution network (CDN) may have data about content requests and deliveries but not information about the users requesting the content. Similarly, while a company may have data about how a user was directed to a website (e.g., via a link in an advertisement or by entering a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in a web browser), information about what the user was doing before being directed to the website or after leaving the website is generally unknown.
Outside the advertisement context, networks are generally not equipped to collect sufficient data to understand the behavior, preferences, or attributes of current or potential end users. An understanding of this would enable the companies operating those networks to adjust their business models, advertisement strategies, and/or various features of their product or service to attract new customers and meet customer expectations.
It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.